This Netflix series portrays women’s wrestling in a completely new light

In professional wrestling, by which I mean WWE, not the kind the ancient Greeks did, there are two main breeds of competitor. Faces are the good guys, the superheroes, there to be cheered. Heels are the villains, the bad guys, the cheaters and the dirty fighters, there to be booed.

It’s a symbiotic relationship, describes one wrestler in the new Netflix show GLOW. “The heel makes the face,” he explains. “We make each other better.” The face may be the crowd favourite, but he’s nothing without his foil. Or hers, as is the case in GLOW, which stands for Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, also the name of a real life all-female televised wrestling league that aired on prime time from 1986 to 1990.

The new Netflix comedy—which streams today, coinciding with the 45th anniversary of Title IX—is created by Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch, and executive produced by Orange Is the New Black’s Jenji Kohan. Like Kohan’s last show, this is an ensemble series about an racially diverse group of women from disparate backgrounds who begin as strangers, are forced into close quarters, and slowly cohere into something resembling a group; there are men who wield authority over these women, and who are also sometimes less in-control than they might imagine; and there’s one pair of ladies who have a relationship—and plenty of baggage—that well predates the events on-screen.

That pair in GLOW is Ruth (Alison Brie) and Debbie (Betty Gilpin). Ruth is a self-serious thespian from Omaha, a small fish drowning in the big pond of Los Angeles, with too much gumption for her own good, the type of actress that casting agents bring in so that directors “can see that they don’t really want the thing they think they want.” She’s subsisting on Cinnamon Toast Crunch and taking handouts from her parents to keep the lights on when one of those agents takes pity on her, and sends her to an open call hosted by a washed-up, coked-up director of schlocky genre films named Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron basically playing pre-sobriety Marc Maron). He’s pulling together a ragtag team of ladies to train as wrestlers, for a television series/league that’s privately funded by Bash (Chris Lowell), a wrestling-obsessed party boy and heir to a canning fortune.

Debbie is Ruth’s opposite, and also her closest friend. She’s a hot blonde soap star who chucked it all to become a Pasadena housewife and mom. By the end of episode one, we discover (in stages) that Ruth is sleeping with a married man, that that man is actually Debbie’s husband Mark (Rich Sommer), and that Mark has confessed all to his wife. Blinded by rage, Debbie storms into Ruth’s wrestling practice to confront her, and in short order signs on as the star of Sam’s show.

Ruth is a natural heel. Debbie is a natural face. If they can work together, they can make each other better. But wrestling, like life, isn’t that simple. A face can become a heel. A heel can become a face. GLOW takes a lot of pleasure in flipping the script.

At one point, Ruth, working out a Soviet persona to use in the ring, refers to herself as a Matryoshka doll, a good clue into how Flahive and Mensch conceive of the many layers of their show. Another example: When we meet Ruth, she’s wearing a teal power suit, and giving an impassioned monologue. “There are good guys, and there are bad guys, and we are the good guys,” she proclaims. “You see that name on my door, it’s my father’s name, son of a bitch, but this isn’t about him. This is about justice. This is about holding on to what’s ours. This is about my company, and my name, and I will not be bullied into submission.” Zoom out and it’s clear she’s auditioning for a role. Zoom out again, and you see the two casting agents, both women, behind the camera. They inform her that she’s reading the male part. The female part is a secretary.

Flahive and Mensch clearly relish ambiguity, which works in GLOW’s favour. In an early episode, Ruth asks Sam: “Are you hiring actors to play wrestlers, or are we the wrestlers?” “Yes,” he answers, and it kind of says it all. Are women wrestlers feminists, taking control of their bodies and their destinies, or are they merely catering to the lascivious male gaze? Yes. Is Ruth unlikeable because we’re conditioned to dislike overtly ambitious women, or is she actually just kind of annoying? Yes. When some of these characters build wrestling personas based on racial and ethnic stereotypes are they perpetuating those damaging ideas, or exploding them from within? Yes.

There are no straightforward answers. Tamee (Kia Stevens), who is black, develops a flamboyant alter ego called The Welfare Queen, who uses a Mr. Goodbar as her remote control and says things like, “Y’all stupid for going to work every day and paying taxes.” She approaches Sam to express concern about the offensiveness of her character. “That’s the genius of it!” he retorts. “It’s commentary on an existing stereotype. It’s a ‘fuck you’ to the Republican party and their welfare reform and race-baiting shit.” But when Tamee and Cherry (Sydelle Noel), also black, develop their own wrestling-ring plotline in which they take on and defeat a pair of white women in Klan hoods, they’re told by the network: “There’s no world in which KKK members are going to be wrestling on television.” One stereotype is palatable to the (presumably white) corporate overlords; the other is not.

In its first season, Orange Is the New Black won viewers over with deep dives into its characters’ histories. Kohan’s latest offering is a slower burn. We become acquainted with these women more through their struggles to find wrestling personas than through any great investment in their actual backstories. In fact, somewhat bafflingly for a show about women wrestlers, its writers spend the most time and energy digging into how Sam became Sam. Is this a commentary on Hollywood sexism, or is GLOW not quite as feminist as it seems? By its own logic, the answer is probably: Yes.

Sometimes it feels as if GLOW’s creators simply had too many ideas they wanted to explore. In these ten, 30ish-minute episodes, these characters wrestle (pun intended) with misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, miscarriage, abortion, the Cold War, incest, and Reagan-era conservatism. There are egregiously weird, almost surreal touches: a robot who deals drugs, a woman who has lived for five years as a wolf. There’s a plotline in which an 18-year-old Russian Jew gets circumcised, and another in which a pair of Beverly Hills stoner hairdressers spend an entire episode making crank calls.

The criticism of professional wrestling is that it’s fixed, canned, fake, and predictable. GLOW is none of those things. It’ll keep you guessing, right to the very end.